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This chapter examines the intersections of transnational Islam with the neoliberal capitalist economy through an ethnographic analysis of the transformations in the South Asian ethnic economy, from its inception and development as a center of South Asian commerce in the 1980s to its twenty-first-century avatar as production and consumption nodes in the “transnational Muslim heritage economy.” The narratives and the everyday lives of Pakistani ethnic entrepreneurs who own and manage the businesses, and the working class and the working poor who provide much of the labor for these businesses, provide an important case study of the classed heterogeneity of the Pakistani Muslim community in Houston. Moreover, these narratives demonstrate the experience of marginality within ethnic spaces of commerce as well as within the larger American society.

This book tries to provide a novel and comparative perspective on the governmental drive to create healthier, more productive, engaged citizens. In order to achieve this, the book is structured around three key arguments that are woven throughout the chapters. The first asserts that personal responsibility and informed choice may be discursive bedrocks of neoliberal health policy, but the relative influence of people's circumstances or ‘luck’ has received far too little attention. The second argument builds on the first and posits that the call for sensible behaviour emerges from the need to manage tensions internal to many neoliberal economies. Third, the book argues that, with personal lifestyle choices now accepted as having a complex array of negative externalities, encouraging sensible lifestyle choices has become a tool in a range of public policies that extend far beyond public health.

This chapter examines how the neoliberal economy permeates into everyday practices of local lives, enabled by the support of local infrastructures. As India defines its place in the global economy as the high-tech solution center for business operations, new forms of work and work environments have emerged in the communication and information-technology sectors. The media in the United States and India glamorize these jobs and depict the employees as enjoying their fiber-optic journey into a new identity. Indeed, a popular thread of reportage claims that call-center jobs have liberated Indian youth and turned them into avid consumers, thereby providing a necessary push to the traditionalism of Indian society, especially with regard to women. However, the ways in which gender issues are set into motion by globalization are far more complex. The chapter thus assesses how new media technologies are reorganizing labor practices and everyday life for women in India.

This chapter evaluates the case of Australian state (Labor) governments. It outlines four distinctive state Labor governments in Australia in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. In all cases, Labor held office for a relatively sustained period of time, before eventually losing. These state Labor governments offered a distinctive approach to governance that reshaped and renewed the trajectory of social democracy, especially in the face of neoliberal economic settings. Yet, in almost all these cases, these Labor governments were ejected from office. However, in contrast to some of the other cases in this volume, Labor has regained power in many of the state jurisdictions. So, while the Labor model of ‘strategic government’ might have passed, there might be further lessons here about how Labor can regain power.